Open Forum

Hello Cvent Community,   

We are back with our July Member Spotlight. The time we are going to talk to a member who has been a Cvent customer and is now working as a Cvent employee. Her journey has been incredible and inspiring.  

With that said, our next Member Spotlight features... (insert drumroll sound effect)              
 

@Michele Gebrayel 

Meet Michele 

Michele is working as a Senior Meeting Technology Advisor at Cvent since January 2022. She has been using the Cvent platform since 2013 including Supplier Network, Event Management, OnArrival, Inquisium, Attendee Hub, and Salesforce integration, and was the first Cvent client to implement Cvent’s native Zoom integration. I earned Cvent’s Event Management Professional Management Advanced, Virtual Events, Hybrid Events, Account Administrator, and Attendee Hub Certificates. Michele loves everything tropical, but she loves to ski too! You can find her sipping on white wine, trying new & unique foods, and enjoying her tortico cat, Tessa! 

She is also hosting the Pre-CONNECT Community Meet-Up on July 19th 2023, 1 PM ET.  
 

You can find and connect with Michele on LinkedIn here:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/michele-gebrayel/  

@Megha Jetley was able to have a chat with Michele and ask her some questions. 

Share your journey from being a customer to an employee with Cvent 

You may remember me from being active in the Cvent Community or presenting at Cvent CONNECT in the past as a customer or even possibly when we hosted our first virtual Pre-CONNECT Meet-Up in 2021. 

I have not been as active in the Community the past year because I made a very exciting transition to Cvent, and I am now an official Cventer! 

I started in January 2022 as a Senior Meeting Technology Advisor. They have been keeping me very busy and I have been learning all things Cvent which I thought I knew, but I don’t! It's been very exciting! 

I tell people that being a Cventer is like attending CONNECT training sessions every day. There's always something new to learn an activity to participate in and a lot of knowledge transfer. I have really enjoyed having the opportunity to extremely expand my knowledge base.

Tell us more about the upcoming Cvent Community Meet-Up

So, speaking of Cvent Virtual Pre-CONNECT Meet-Up, we are hosting another one on July 19th at 1 PM ET. I thought it would be great to bring that back for the attendees, virtual or in-person, to have the opportunity to meet some familiar faces prior to getting onsite in Las Vegas. 

I found it helpful when we did it in 2021, I met some amazing people and I'm still connected with them today! I believe some of them are going to be joining the virtual meet-up that we're hosting on the 19th. It will be great to have an opportunity to see them again, kind of face-to-face. 

I hope that if you're reading this and you are attending Cvent CONNECT, you will be able to join us. 

And if you're thinking still about attending Cvent CONNECT and you're on the fence, I highly recommend attending it! The amount of information that you gain from attending Cvent CONNECT is exponential.  

The relationships that you make at Cvent CONNECT with other people who are working in the same industry as you, working on or through the same challenges is helpful. 

When I presented in 2020 virtually, I was paired up with 3 other Cvent clients. We had so much fun bantering prior to the sessions and getting to know each other and talking about our topics that we realized that we're all using this event tool but very differently. One of the gals decided to invite us all to do a monthly get-together, and believe it or not, we still meet regularly almost every month since that time, which was when we got introduced in July 2020. 

So, it's been great having this group together and meeting up. Almost all of us have changed jobs, our roles have changed and we still, even though a couple of them aren't using Cvent because their roles have changed, we still get together and still chit-chat about our new jobs or what's going on in our lives.
 

How has your experience as a customer influenced your work as an employee? 

“I have the experience of being a client and now I am a Cventer.”  

I started using Cvent in 2013, as a customer. We originally started with Venue Sourcing and then went to Event Management. In 2016, I had the opportunity to attend CONNECT, which was a huge eye-opener for me as far as what Cvent could do for my event management program. We added OnArrival and Advanced Surveys to our products. We later added the Salesforce Integration and then the Zoom integration during COVID.